Cycling as a Transit Alternative

A conversation has broken out in the thread originally dedicated to the Scarborough Subway regarding the ability of cycling to reduce demand on the subway if a bike lane were implemented on Bloor-Danforth.

I have moved all of the comments related to this topic here to separate them from discussions of the subway extension.

For some specific comparisons, Norrebrogade Street in Copenhagen is very similar to downtown Yonge street. Yonge Street in Toronto was, of course, car-free during the summer months in the 1970’s and can easily be made permanently car-light as Norrebrogade Street is today. See these links here and here.

For downtown Toronto streets with streetcar tracks, the best comparison is downtown Amsterdam with its extensive network of streetcar (tram) tracks and high-quality cycling infra that supports a 70% cycle mode share.

Here is a good example of many (not all!) streets with streetcar tracks and downtown Toronto street widths. It is on Saturday, December 29, 2012 so the traffic is very light and we can see the street infrastructure.

In short, downtown Toronto streets have a street width that is perfectly fine hosting both streetcars and proper CROW standard cycle infrastructure.

Steve: Although some of your examples don’t exactly match, what they all have in common (where the right-of-way is comparable) is an absence of parking and a substantial reduction in the space available for cars (in some cases to zero). If that’s your goal, fine, say so, but accept what this means for access to the buildings on the streets in question. You are addressing a far more extensive replacement of auto capacity with cycling capacity than most other writers in this thread are talking about. Indeed, if your only acceptable solution is to ban or very severely restrict auto traffic, then your chances of success are almost nil.

“The issue is that cyclists intrude into pedestrian space including sidewalks and crosswalks inappropriately more often than motorists do.”

Kevin’s comment:

The issue is the large number of car drivers that kill and seriously injure people by intruding into pedestrian space. In my opinion the key issue is not frequency (“more often”) but the large body count of dead people killed by car drivers. In the last year alone, there are a large number of stomach-turning photographs from the Toronto Star and other media of these victims of car drivers who thought they were safe on the sidewalk.

Although annoying at times for pedestrians, it is so safe for people to ride on the sidewalk that some cities in Ontario have legalized this practice. Burlington is one example.

But most people find that it is rather unpleasant to ride on the sidewalk and would really prefer to be on a properly designed CROW standard protected cycle lane. For example, in New York City, when the protected cycle lane on Prospect Park West was installed, sidewalk cycling went from 46% of people to only 4%.

In other words, the way to end sidewalk cycling is to install proper protected cycle lanes on the street.

The flip side of sidewalk cycling is that pedestrians are allowed on many Toronto bicycle paths. Yes, this can be quite annoying for people riding. My own blood pressure has been raised at times by dog owners who fail to leash or control their dogs so that they run uncontrollably all over the bicycle path. Or whose leash is long and (AAARGH!) stretches all the way across the bicycle path. Or pedestrians who deliberately ignore the large signs telling them to keep to the right.

But in spite of all this bad pedestrian behaviour, the number of casualties they cause is very low. Nothing like the hundreds of people killed and seriously injured by car drivers.

Steve: And so we come full circle. I was criticized for treating cyclists as a class regardless of how low their actual “bad behaviour” may be, and you are doing the same thing for motorists to justify increased access to areas that are now pedestrian. I agree that you need proper cycling facilities, but taking over sidewalk space is not the way to do it.

Stop concocting arguments and recognize that you are not going to get everything you want simply by claiming to be the most saintly of travel modes.

I think we need more one way streets. That way we can have one curb separated transit lane (streetcars and/or buses), 2 curb separated car lanes, 1 wide bike lane (unidirectional as well), and 2 sidewalks (one on each side) and the next parallel street on either side can be opposite directional and so on. More car and taxi free streets will also be welcome. These streets need only serve transit, pedestrians, bikes, and emergency vehicles. Delivery trucks, construction vehicles, etc should only be permitted with specific permits and preferably late at night only (late at night permits can be made cheaper to encourage this). Any funds raised in this manner can go towards improving existing transit infrastructure and/or building new ones. Also by bike I mean 100% human powered and not having any motors or engines. Also strollers that are permitted on transit vehicles should have a certain maximum acceptable width. All too often women carry these extremely wide ones (sometimes 2 kids wide with only one kid in it) – this is unacceptable.

Steve: There are many locations where a nearby street to serve the opposite direction simply is not available, let alone one that will take the auto traffic you plan to displace.

The situation with baby carriages will improve with all-door loading and large vestibule areas designed for this type of use. Including them in a proposal re one-way streets is a non-sequitur.

“Also strollers that are permitted on transit vehicles should have a certain maximum acceptable width. All too often women carry these extremely wide ones (sometimes 2 kids wide with only one kid in it) – this is unacceptable.”

The Ontario Human Rights Commission report of March 27, 2002 identified that parents with small children had to be accommodated as did people with mobility handicaps so transit vehicles have to accept them. There is however a maximum size of wheel chair that has to be allowed and baby buggies should also be required to fit within this envelope. You can find the size if you google it.

If the dimensions are published and widely available then it would be easier to control these SUV baby buggies but we cannot restrict those that meet the guidelines.

Steve: Knowing the size of some chairs and scooters, one would need a truly gargantuan stroller to exceed the limits. However, I found no actual specs in the OHRC report, and google was not helpful either.

Steve: “Knowing the size of some chairs and scooters, one would need a truly gargantuan stroller to exceed the limits. However, I found no actual specs in the OHRC report, and google was not helpful either.”

I think that they are found in the building codes for the city but as I am off to Amsterdam tomorrow I may not find them for a while.

“If the McCowan corridor is used for the Bloor-Danforth extension, what will happen to the current Scarborough Rapid Transit right-of-way? Bicycle and e-bike path?”

e-bikes? ABSOLUTELY NOT. e-bikes should be banned from using bike lanes, public parks, and sidewalks. Anywhere you will allow e-bikes, motorcycles should also be allowed.

Steve:

“Come and smell the recycling plant!”

It’s recycling some of the garbage you dump. Earth has finitely many resources and so we need more recycling plants. I would welcome building more recycling plants all over Toronto as it is the right thing to do. We should also ship garbage back from landfills just so we can recycle. And Toronto should hire people to sort garbage to increase the amount recycled. We should build recycling plants for plastics, paper, cardboards, glass, cans, etc and there is no place better to build them than high density areas as high density areas produce the highest amounts of garbage (it will save a lot of gas and hence a lot of pollution and money on having to ship the garbage off to far away recycling plants). That recycling plant should never have been built in Scarborough as there is not enough density in Scarborough to justify even a subway line (according to people in Downtown and East York) and so Downtown Toronto would have been a better location but there is still plenty of room Downtown for recycling plants. There are a lot of unused industrial buildings in Downtown and converting them to recycle plants makes a lot of environmental sense.

Steve: Please don’t lecture me about the value of recycling. The point I was trying to make is that the area around Midland Station is not exactly prime territory for either new residential development or as a beauty spot at the end of an elevated walkway.

I am in Rotterdam for 5 days; Amsterdam Hotels are almost 5 times as expensive as in Rotterdam. Hamish and the cyclists would think they had died and gone to cycling heaven. The number of bikes at “Centraal Station” are amazing. Every street has bike lanes but when your city is almost entirely destroyed in WW II you can change the way it is built for the better. The other advantage that Rotterdam has is that the only hill you will see is at a bridge over a canal, railway, or roadway.

Tom says;

“e-bikes? ABSOLUTELY NOT. e-bikes should be banned from using bike lanes, public parks, and sidewalks. Anywhere you will allow e-bikes, motorcycles should also be allowed.”

They allow e-bikes and mopeds on the bike paths in Rotterdam, at least they use them, without any problems. Is you opinion based on statistics or do you just want the “purity” of muscle power only. This would be discrimination against those who which to bile but suffer from a disability that prevents them from peddling up hill. Does the ODA have any comments on this?

I have just read my post and have made a mental note never to post after an oversees flight and 36 hours without sleep. It is almost as bad as 2 days on percocet. I have been noticing all the bikes and bike routes in Rotterdam and have come to the conclusion that some people must leave a bike at their destination station as there are a different set of bikes stored in the evenings than in the day. There is a 3 story parking garage for bikes at Centraal Station which must hold close to 10,000 bikes and it was still nearly full late in the evening.

The bikes in Rotterdam are more utilitarian than many seen in Canada but they don’t have any hills to speak of. Bikes, e-bikes and mopeds use the bike paths together and manage not to hit each other or pedestrian or other vehicles though one cyclist nearly got creamed by the tram I was on this afternoon. An emergency application stopped us 0.5 m short of hitting him though this is the exception. As a pedestrian you soon learn to be careful crossing red pavement because bikes are silent, as least mopeds make noise.

Rotterdam’s big advantage is its ability to build a full bike network when totally re-building a city destroyed in WW II. I don’t know if it is possible to build a similar system in Toronto but it would probably be useful in the old city proper.

Steve: After Etobicoke and Scarborough declare war on downtown (with East York trying to be the Switzerland of Toronto), we may get a chance to redesign all three of them from scratch. Meanwhile, we have to put up with the constraints each of them has.

“For downtown Toronto streets with streetcar tracks, the best comparison is downtown Amsterdam with its extensive network of streetcar (tram) tracks and high-quality cycling infra that supports a 70% cycle mode share.”

Amsterdam is perfectly drivable. In fact, in will take you much less time to drive for, say 5km in the rush hour than in Downtown Toronto. The difference though, is that in European city centres cars, highways and parking lots don’t dominate the landscape. That is because there are just fast and efficient alternatives to driving, something that most of the GTA lacks.

Over the last few weeks something incredible happened. The construction at York street blocked Adelaide with it’s heavy, Parkway bound traffic. There was no mayhem on surrounding streets. With the exception of a few cars exiting the Exchange Tower car park bikes took over the road. The traffic just disappeared.

In the other part of the city, the Eglinton planning committee came up with a preliminary study to reduce the central section of the street from 5 to 3 lanes between Avenue and Mt. Pleasant to accommodate wider sidewalks and cycling tracks. The report was received with enthusiasm by residents, drivers included.

Having said that, downtown sections of King, Queen and possibly Dundas and College can function very well with reduction of car traffic to one lane in one direction only, possibly with reversing directions to discourage through driving. Property access will be maintained, taxis, trucks and emergency vehicles will still be able to stop, the traffic will be light and slow that will make safe sharing the road between cars and bikes and streetcars will get their right of way.

And sorry, car commuters, 20% of people on downtown streets take 80% of the space. By the way, I own and drive a car. I just don’t take it into the core unless I have to.

I was not that writer, but cycling provides mobility for many people who are disabled through having lost the use of their legs. There is even a Canadian company that manufactures hand cycles for disabled people who cannot use their legs.

So yes, many people who use Wheel-Trans can be cyclists using hand cycles for shorter trips, but use Wheel-trans for longer trips.

I love it when able-bodied people decide what people with disabilities can or cannot do based on a few google searches. It also shows how little understanding you have of these issues.

1. If one does not have the use of their legs, they cannot use this bike for transportation as they will need an assistive device upon arriving to their destination. There is no room to strap on a chair or walker.

2. Many Wheel-Trans users have a whole host of other issues like debilitating fatigue, spasticity, upper limb weakness, neuropathic pain, etc. in addition to lower limb mobility issues which would make using this hand bike next to impossible.

3. Most people with mobility issues have poor circulation. Being exposed to the elements in the winter can be very dangerous.

4. The bikes retail for around $3,000. Study after study has shown that if a person with a disability is employed, they are frequently paid less. To suggest that people spend this amount of money on what is essentially a recreation or exercise vehicle (not suitable for transportation) is clearly not taking income into consideration.

Please consider ALL the issues before making these suggestions for people with disabilities.